Piranesi. It is what he calls me. Which is strange because as far as I remember it is not my name.
Like other readers, I picked up Piranesi because I had loved Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell many years ago; and like other reviewers, I’ll stress that most of the charm I found in this read was a result of going in with no idea at all of what to expect from it. So to remain as unspoilery as possible: Piranesi begins as a mysterious adventure tale, and as details are slowly meted out, Clarke uses her invented world and empathy-invoking protagonist to make some fairly profound statements about the meaning of life and what it is to be human. Piranesi is not a magic-filled alt-history like Jonathan Strange (this is definitely not just more of the same) but Clarke’s writing is just as evocative, imaginative, and entertaining this time around. Simply a lovely read.
In the early evening I went to the Eighth Vestibule to fish in the Waters of the Lower Staircase. The Beams of the Declining Sun shone through the Windows of the Lower Halls, striking the Surface of the Waves and making ripples of golden Light flow across the Ceiling of the Staircase and over the Faces of the Statues. When night fell, I listened to the Songs that the Moon and Stars were singing and I sang with them. The World feels Complete and Whole, and I, its Child, fit into it seamlessly.
To be slightly more spoilery: In the beginning we meet this “Piranesi” and learn that he lives in a vast complex of marble hallways, chambers, and vestibules — some flooded with seas and tides, some derelict, some up in the clouds — each with countless damp niches filled with statues of characters from some familiarish mythology. Piranesi spends his days split between survival tasks (fishing, mending tattered clothing, gathering and drying seaweed for fires) and a scientific exploration of the further reaches of this House and its Features, and twice a week, he meets with The Other: the only other living occupant of this world; an unfriendly man engaged in his own quasi-scientific enquiry into arcane knowledge. The story is told as a series of Piranesi’s journal entries; an organic and charming format — in which he does his best to report on everything of note and work out the bits of life that confuse him — and while the reader may regard him as naive and vulnerable (his does not seem like an easy existence), Piranesi himself seems delighted with the House and how it provides for his needs. As information reaches Piranesi that threatens an existential crisis, there’s a real sense that this is the forbidden knowledge that might cause his expulsion from Paradise:
When I tried to retrace those steps my mind kept returning to the image of the One-Hundred-and-Ninety-Second Western Hall in the Moonlight, to its Beauty, to its deep sense of Calm, to the reverent looks on the Faces of the Statues as they turned (or seemed to turn) towards the Moon. I realised that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery. The sight of the One-Hundred-and-Ninety-Second Western Hall in the Moonlight made me see how ridiculous that is. The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of Itself. It is not the means to an end.
After finishing Piranesi, I learned that Clarke has been suffering from an undiagnosed chronic condition (maybe Lyme Disease? Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? something post-viral?), and this article in The New Yorker not only explains where she has been for the past dozen years (mostly unable to travel or write or even get out of bed some days), but also lists the influences she brought to this work (etchings by the 18th century artist, Giovanni Piranesi, whose work adds meaning to the title; the decrepit city of Charn in C. S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew, a book that gave Piranesi one of its two epigraphs and much of its ethos; the sense of unproductive confinement serrendipitously shared by Clarke due to her illness and those of us who are reading this book during a COVID lockdown), and all of this information makes Piranesi seem like an inevitable product of Clarke’s recent experiences and interests. I am certain that in her months and years of isolation, Clarke had a lot of time to think about the meaning of life, the meaning of “progress”, and consider man’s relationship to the universe; big ideas that she was able to thought-provokingly explore in a small book that read like a mysterious adventure tale. It might be kind of niche, but this book suited me to a tee.
